If someone were to carry out a random survey of
contemporary political theory, much in the mode of fashion designers, to
discover what is ‘in’ and what is ‘out’, she would probably find
the following. Whereas socialism is out, market friendliness is in,
planning is out and liberalisation is in, national self-sufficiency is out
and globalisation is in, class is out and social stratification is in,
revolution is definitely out and social movements are in, the state is out
and civil society is in, heterosexuality is out and gay and lesbian rights
are in, and modernity has been out for some time and postmodernity is in,
though it too seems to be rapidly on its way out.

Further, homogeneity is definitely out and pluralism
definitely in, the politics of ideas is out and the politics of identity
is in, the nation state is most certainly out and sub-nationalism is in.
Correspondingly, commonality is unconditionally out and difference and
diversity is unconditionally in, ethnicity is of course out and culture
unequivocally in. Above all national integration and the image of the
melting pot is out, and multiculturalism and recognition is absolutely in.
In fact, most of what is ‘in’ – culture, diversity, pluralism and
the politics of identity among others – is best captured by the concept
of multiculturalism.

Of all the concepts that have caught and sparked off
new notions of the politically permissible, multiculturalism as an
umbrella concept occupies the pride of place. It is the latest spin
industry to capture the imagination of sociologists, political theorists,
policy planners and anthropologists. Economists are, of course, left
untouched, trapped as they are in the positivist chains of their
discipline.

To reduce multiculturalism to only the latest fad on
the horizon of political fashions would, however, be a mistake. For unlike
fashion designers, political theorists cannot but address the problems of
their historical situation, because political theory is necessarily a
historical product. Therefore, if multiculturalism, whose presupposition
is cultural diversity and the valuing of this diversity, looms large in
the preoccupations of political theorists, something must have happened in
polities across the world to catapult the concept onto the centre-stage of
political theory.

What has happened is simply this. Multiculturalism is
the ‘unintentional’ by-product of the collapse of a grand vision –
that of a culturally homogenous nation state. The logic of the vision is
best summed up in the by now famous words of Massimo d’ Azeglio when, on
the eve of the unification of Italy he said: ‘We have made Italy, all
that remains is to make Italians.’ And this model dominated the
imaginaries of the leaders of the postcolonial world, even as they sought
to weld diverse and disparate populations subscribing to different and
possibly incommensurable belief systems into something called the nation.

I

t is not as if
the leaders did not recognise the fact of deep cultural diversities within
their societies. But they hoped that people would leave behind their
particular identities, hinged onto the hat stand along with their umbrellas
as it were, whenever they ventured out into the public sphere on a rainless
day. In the public sphere they would assume the identity of a somewhat
faceless, abstract citizen bearing no marker of class, caste, gender,
religion or ethnicity. The public sphere of society correspondingly would
represent no class, no gender, no ethnic or cultural referral; instead it
would be defined by rights, by the rule of law, by citizenship, and by civic
ties.

History, however, was to take its own revenge. During the
1980s, as movements and discourses centring on identity erupted across the
globe with considerable force, issues of religious, ethnic and linguistic
identities came to command the theatre of politics. Nation states, it came
to be recognised, had in the name of national identity either suppressed
distinctive minority cultures or devalued them. Minorities, in time,
rightfully and sometimes aggressively resisted the denial or the devaluation
of their own cultures – look at Rwanda and Burundi, Sri Lanka and
Pakistan, Nigeria, Iraq, Quebec in Canada, the Afro-Americans in the U.S.A.,
and parts of India.

In this global ‘ethnic explosion’, minority groups
asserted that their distinctiveness and common comprehensive cultures were
not only viable, but that they should be recognised in the sense of being
valued by the body politic. They further highlighted the fact that the
vision of a strong and centralised nation state, which ostensibly was free
of any particular cultural referent point, had turned out to be a project
for the legitimisation of dominant understandings and the devaluation of
minority identities.

I

n India, it took
the Dalit movement in the 1970s to accentuate the fact that the Indian
nation state was not empty of any referent point; that it was uncomfortably
Brahmanical and uncomfortably oppressive, despite promises of economic and
social redistribution. The social status (or rather its lack) of the Dalits,
had not changed a whit; it may even have worsened under the domination of a
system whose caste basis had been rendered opaque because it had been
prettified by shibboleths such as progress and economic transformation.

So wrote V.L. Karlekar, rejecting the promises made by an
empty public sphere.

What had gone wrong, we should ask, with the national
vision – a vision that at one time had made imaginations soar to new
heights of what was politically permissible? Indian elites had built a
national culture that was based on the invisibility and marginalisation of
minority groups. Entrepreneurs who were working over time to create a
national culture which could recognisably be called Indian, had also built
into it the denial of recognition to marginal groups – caste and religious
groups, but also tribals, women and linguistic groups. Our national culture
inevitably came to reflect the presuppositions and the values, if not the
explicit world-views, of the dominant community. Resultantly, the minorities
had been both devalued as well as marginalised, their world-views either
sidelined or downgraded, even as they were asked to join something that we
euphemistically called the mainstream.

T

he struggle for
identity has provided interesting insights into the concepts of oppression
and resistance. It made us realise that though people needed access to the
means of social reproduction, they also needed ‘recognition’ as people
who matter and who matter equally. And recognition happens to be the core
concept of multiculturalism.

The concept of recognition is, of course, not new to
political theory. Hegel had in The Phenomenology of the Spirit conceptualised
recognition as the distinctive need of human beings. In recent theory,
philosophers Charles Taylor and Axel Honneth have hinged their political
theories around recognition. The concept of recognition at one basic level
indicates that we become conscious of ourselves when we see that others have
become conscious of us. In other words, we recognise ourselves through and
in the eyes of others.

There is, however, a deeper meaning attached to
recognition. The term indicates that people need the approval and respect of
others in order to develop self-esteem, self confidence and self-respect.
The recognition of the self through being ‘seen’ or recognised by
others, therefore, enters the constitution of self-identity in a fundamental
sense. ‘Human integrity’, argues Honneth, ‘owes its existence, at a
deep level, to the patterns of approval and recognition.’1
Charles Taylor’s influential essay on ‘The Politics of Recognition’
extends the concept of recognition from individuals to cultures, even as he
provides a persuasive philosophical argument that all cultures possess equal
worth. ‘[T]he further demand we are looking at here is that we all
recognize the equal value of different cultures; that we not only let them
survive, but acknowledge their worth.’2

T

he political
location of this argument is the realisation, elegantly argued by Will
Kymlicka, that the political and the cultural community are not coextensive,
and that the political community consists of a plurality of cultures, some
of which will necessarily be marginal to the constitution of the polity.3
What is more important, Kymlicka suggested, is that the norms and the
understandings of the dominant community, excluding thereby the cultures of
the minority groups, more often than not define the political community. But
this, he was to argue, had been ignored by most political theorists.

It is true that political theorists since the days of
Plato have tended to assume that the political community whose problems they
address is united by a shared culture. The presence of minority communities,
which may be, as Kymlicka put it, outmanoeuvred and outbid on issues that
really matter to them, has been largely overlooked in the preoccupation with
national cultures that would provide homogeneity to the body politic. All
this amounts to what can be called cultural injustice, for if minority
cultures are either devalued in the public sphere, or marginalised, they
suffer from a denial of self-respect.

I

f this is so,
then we need to institute protection for these communities exactly in the
way political theory had recognised the indispensability of protecting the
economically marginalised groups through redistributive justice. This and
other related arguments made such an impact upon political thinking that
cultural rights for minorities have been put onto the agenda since the late
1980s.4 Multiculturalism simply
brought about the realisation that plural cultures need to be respected and
validated through explicit acts of recognition. That, cultures which have
been marginalised should be revalued and revalidated in the public sphere
through, for example, group representation. Second, if minority cultures are
either decaying because of what has been termed ‘benevolent neglect’ or
if they are subjected to virulent attacks, they should be protected through
special measures such as minority rights, which incidentally have been on
the formal agenda of Indian politics since the Motilal Nehru constitution of
1928.

U

nderlying such
and related recommendations is a wider theme which has overtaken
philosophising in the political mode. With an expansion of our understanding
of what is meant by the term human, has grown the realisation that the
existence of viable and flourishing cultural communities is a precondition
for intelligible understanding and action. Our cultural community provides
us with the evaluative resources which enable us to both make sense of the
world and to appraise phenomenon as valuable and valueless, worthwhile and
worthless, moral, immoral and amoral. In this sense, culture gives us the
wherewithal or the cultural capital to think with. Culture then
becomes a resource in enhancing or deepening our personal faculties of
reflection and judgement as we appropriate the world in the sense of making
it comprehensible.

Note that the imperative to render the world
intelligible, to map it into comprehensible categories, is perhaps the
first, even a primary requirement of human beings. Without access to the
resources that help us to interpret and evaluate the world – for
interpretation is also at the same time an act of evaluation – we are
clueless. Therefore, communities I suggest are important, because they
provide their members with structures of meaning, or what I call evaluative
resources to render the world intelligible. (I employ the term resource
not in the sense of an instrument, but in the sense of historically
constituted stocks of assets that we can draw upon to render the world
meaningful.)

C

ertainly, our
use of the categories provided by our community for understanding may be so
unguarded and reflexive, so unthinking and imperceptible, that we may not
even realise that we are seeing the world through the lens provided by these
evaluative systems. All that this means is that culture is subterranean,
pervading deep structures of cognition. This is evinced in the fact that
individuals do not for most of the time think consciously about what they
are doing or thinking. However, if we were to ask them why they do
think oract in a particular way, they will probably be able to give
good reasons for doing so. We, therefore, identify deeply with our culture,
howsoever imperceptible that identification may be. What is important is
that without access to the resources of our culture, we are rendered
defenceless.

If this is so, then the marginalisation of a minority
culture will leave its members bewildered and lost because their identity is
bound up with that of their culture. Correspondingly, the denigration of a
culture, through for example perverse stereotyping, will harm the
self-esteem of the individual incalculably, because to deny a culture
recognition is to deny recognition to the members of the culture. The damage
this wreaks on individual and collective psyches is incalculable. ‘Slighting
my culture,’ writes Joseph Raz, ‘holding it up for ridicule, denying its
value, and so on, hurts me and offends my dignity. It is particularly
offensive if the slight bears the imprimatur of my state or of the majority
or official culture of my country.’5

The only remedy is to revalue cultures that have been
either marginalised from the public arena or devalued, through extending
them recognition. Recognition takes two forms: one, that minority cultures
be represented in all forms whether it be legislative and deliberative
assemblies, decision-making bodies or the school curricula. Second, that
stereotypes which type cultures in perverse forms be dispensed with, a
strategy that has led to what is called political correctness.
Multiculturalism has replaced a host of strategies – from the melting pot
in the U.S.A., to tolerance and national integration in India. The model for
multiculturalism, of course, remains Canada which has attempted with some
success to negotiate the relationship of the state to an ethnically plural
society.

N

ot that
multiculturalism has had an easy progress in politics or in political
theory. Debates on the subject have come to be ensnared in some insuperable
dilemmas. For instance, do we value a culture because it is vital and
life-giving for its members? Or do we value a culture as distinct from its
members? Whereas liberals are quite happy with extending respect to a
culture because it enhances the worth of its individual members, they are
understandably reluctant to emphasise the worth of group identities. Groups
may well demand the extension of respect in the body politic and yet be
reluctant to give that respect to their own members, such as women. What
answer does multiculturalism give to this conundrum? Does the formulation
even permit such questions? In any case, what does it mean to respect
cultures?

Thomas Sowell for instance, scornfully dismisses Taylor’s
suggestion that we extend equal respect to cultures. ‘History cannot be
prettified in the interests of promoting "acceptance" or
"mutual respect" among people or cultures. There is much in the
history of every people that does not deserve respect. Whether with
individuals or with groups, respect is something earned, not a door prize
handed out to all. It cannot be prescribed by third parties. "Equal
respect" is an internally contradictory evasion. If everything is
respected equally, then the term respect has lost its meaning.’6

T

wo problems can
be identified with this and other first-cousin formulations. One, the
critics of multiculturalism forget that imperial histories have directly
privileged some cultures as worthy of respect and downgraded others as
unworthy. Nathan Glazer, who is a reluctant multiculturalist, for instance,
attacks the inclusion of African histories in school curricula on the ground
that whereas western history is history, other ‘Third World’ histories
are myths.7 He completely ignores
the fact that imperialism drafted this distinction in the first place. In
any case the western tradition of history writing has been notoriously
suffused with myths – witness the legitimisation of imperialism in the
name of the civilising mission.

The second problem is that culture in the perspective of
the critics is treated either as structure or as a set of exotic practices
such as rituals and food habits. But culture, as I have argued above, is a
set of meaning systems. This does not mean that individuals armed with these
meaning systems will make the same sense of the world. What is important is
that they have a referent point. So when one individual, say p, makes a
proposition that x means y, everyone in the cultural community should be
able to understand the meaning of the proposition. This does not imply that
all of them will agree, they can put forth different interpretation of the
proposition. But before they do so, they should be able to understand what p
means when he says that x means y. Cultures are not shackles that bind
understanding, they allow understanding, and sometimes that understanding
can both transgress as well as modify the culture. Cultures are never
static, because they are subjected to reworking even subversions through
differing individual understandings.

T

he second set of
criticisms of multiculturalism have to do with the assertion that scholars
have shifted attention from structures of economic marginalisation to that
of cultural marginalisation. Nancy Fraser, for instance, attacks Taylor for
his emphasis on cultural injustice, as if we no longer have reason to be
concerned with economic injustice, or as if cultural injustice is more
important than economic injustice, or as if cultural injustice provides us
with the means to attack economic injustice.8
Her complaint against all multiculturalists is that they have supplanted
concern for material injustice with concern for cultural injustice. The
problem is that whereas Taylor drops all engagement with economic injustice,
Fraser goes too far in the opposite direction and drops the idea that the
struggle for recognition may be relatively independent of economic
inequality and that it may be a distinct human good in its own right.

W

hereas it is not
enough to respect communities without extending material and political
advantages to them, it is also not enough to extend political and material
advantages without extending them respect. Certainly struggles over
redistribution and recognition do not belong to two absolutely, separate
genres. Within economically or politically powerless groups, some segments
of the group can suffer cultural deprivation – women, Dalits, or religious
minorities. Therefore, we cannot neatly divide groups into the economically,
politically and culturally deprived. Each of these factors may overlap, or
they may be relatively autonomous of the other, depending on the historical
situation.

On the other hand, cultural marginalisation may be
all-pervasive. It may have permeated the body politic to such an extent that
groups tend to trace their lack of economic and political resources to the
fact that they are culturally marginalised or that they occupy an inferior
place in the cultural codes of a society. In this case, it is not enough
that we empower a group economically or politically; it may need to be
culturally empowered as well. Or in many cases, economic, political and
cultural marginalisation overlaps, so that in order to economically and
politically empower a group, we will need to culturally empower it as well.

Alternatively, an economically and politically well-off
group may still not secure recognition. Cultural non-recognition may
actually prove to be a hindrance in the effective exercise of economic or
political power, or in being respected for things other than say caste. In
this case, cultural marginalisation is autonomous of economic and political
marginalisation. Therefore, we will have to concentrate on revaluing group
identity. All these factors operate sometimes in tandem with each other,
sometimes autonomously of each other. I prefer to believe from the Indian
historical experience at least, that cultural marginalisation can operate
autonomously of, or in tandem with other forms of exclusion and deprivation.
And it is here that multiculturalism can be of help to emancipate the human
condition.

L

et me elaborate
on this. In India and perhaps all over the world, we can discern two kinds
of discrete/over-lapping moral conflicts. One form of conflict takes the
shape of struggles over material resources, political gains, and against
deprivation. We can deal with this by the redistribution of material and
political resources. The other kind of moral conflict that has come to
dominate the body politic is the struggle for recognition. Extension of
respect becomes absolutely essential, for when perverse and demeaning
stereotypes come to govern the way a particular community is perceived –
as ‘invisible’, ‘inferior’, ‘polluting’, or as ‘threatening’
– we have a potentially incendiary situation on our hands. This leads to
the consolidation of distrust and suspicion, the closing of otherwise fuzzy
boundaries between communities, and resistance.

We need, therefore, to pitch our attempts at two levels
to remedy the situation. Economic and political marginalisation will require
the redistribution of tangible resources. Cultural deprivation will require
the erasure of demeaning images, the revaluation of devalued identities, and
treatment of all people and groups with the dignity they deserve. It will
require recognition.

2. Charles Taylor, ‘The Politics of Recognition’, in Multiculturalism
and the ‘Politics of Recognition’,edited and with a
commentary by Amy Gutmann, Princeton University Press, Princeton, New
Jersey, 1993, p. 64.

3. This is not the precise terminology used by Kymlicka,
but the general sense of his argument is represented by the terms I have
used here. See Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship,Clarendon,
Oxford, 1995.

4. I suggest that a cultural group can be regarded as
marginalised when its values and its worldviews are either not represented
at all or inadequately represented in the public sphere. Let me elaborate on
this. Every human community organises itself symbolically in the shape of
national anthems, flags, rituals, and ceremonies, and if we look at these
systems of representation carefully, we will normally find that they belong
to the repertoire of the majority/dominant community. Minorities not only
find themselves left out of this symbolic definition of society, they are
forced to conform to meaning systems which these symbols codify that are not
their own. Even as minority identities are submerged in the plethora of
meaning systems that characterise a society, the adherents of these
identities experience anomie and alienation.